Cybersecurity Awareness: 4 Tips To Protect Yourself This Holiday Season

By: Austin Heeren, Vice President, Treasury Management Sales Officer

The holiday season is a good time to look at the safeguards you have in place to protect yourself, your identity and your money. Attacks can come from many places, and fraudsters work hard to trick consumers into giving up their personal information.

At MidWestOne Bank, we believe in providing proactive services and solutions to our customers. Here are four things you can do right now to protect yourself from cyber scammers.

1. Use Strong Passwords While most websites and accounts require you to use passwords with a certain number of characters and a variety of letters, numbers and symbols. You can do one better by going above and beyond what they require. Mix up your upper and lowercase letters and create long passwords, as those are harder to crack. Never use the same password for different accounts, in case one gets hacked and is compromised. Use a password manager to ensure all those passwords are safe and easy for you to access when you need them.
2. Enable Multifactor Authentication Multifactor authentication ensures that when logging into an account, more than just a password is needed. This usually includes a code sent to the email address or phone number associated with the account. This ensures that if your password is compromised, fraudsters still won’t be able to get into your account without that code. If one of your accounts asks you to set up multifactor authentication, don’t skip over this step. Protect yourself and your account by adding that extra layer of security and minimizing the risk of someone gaining access to your information. 
3. Don’t Click on Links You Don’t Know Many fraudsters will send texts, emails or other messages with an urgent tone asking you to click a link to verify your information. Never click on links you don’t know or recognize. If you’re not sure if the message is real or not, reach out to the organization, whether it be your bank or another business where you have an account, and ask how they will contact you and if the link is real. Clicking fraudulent links can lead to malicious software on your device or the chance for bad actors to steal your information. Be suspicious of any unsolicited messages, verify the sender and go back to the source to protect yourself.
4. Update Your Devices and Software Regularly Update the software on all of your devices as soon as a new upgrade is available. These updates, while potentially containing new features, will also contain fixes for any vulnerabilities that fraudsters may use to exploit your information. Don’t wait; always upgrade as soon as possible.

While there are more ways than ever for fraudsters to contact consumers and try to exploit information, there are also more options available to protect yourself.